Kill the darling part 6: bury the archaeology

It's time to say goodbyes to "information archaeologies" - Timothy Lenoir's concept, or at least the longer version of the footnote. I love Lenoir's work, but there is no way to keep this in the long form so it is time to bury it. This was in the context of Chapter VI on the concepts of the archive and archival practices for understanding media culture.

In addition to arts contexts, the question of archiving and excavating digital material is one that is crucial for post World War II scientific cultures, and hence histories of science and technology. For such cultures of innovation, where for the first time scientific research was inherently articulated through computational media, the materials left for “future archaeologists” present practical problems. As flagged by Tim Lenoir, such “information archaeologies” point towards how a mapping of science is a mapping of the software and hardware platforms instrumental to the research. Of course, also the development of so many aesthetic innovation in terms of HCI and screen technologies rose from similar science-tech labs too. In Lenoir’s (2007: 365-366) words: “Historians will need to add new tools of information archaeology to their tool-kit in order to write the history of recent science and technology born digitally. Among the types of tools we need are, for instance, emulators of older systems, such as the IBM 360, and other machines, such as Burrough’s machines, Osborn’s, and others that do not have legacy systems maintained by large companies or successor firms. Even early-generation Silicon Graphics machines that appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s are becoming scarce today. In order to research the programs that ranon these machines, we need to construct emulators that run on current generation machines. Beyond this we need to render the original programs in forms readable by current disk drives and other data-reading technologies. While genealogies of software and software languages are being constructed, more attention will have to be devoted to the history of software languages, and their implementations.”

Kill the darling part 5: the voice was dead anyway

This is going to hurt. A small but still to me nice footnote about the intertwinings of the imaginaries of the dead (voice) as part of the phonographic culture and psychoanalytic readings of the haunted voice. Well, if it was dead anyway, better let it go.

A footnote from what will be chapter III on Imaginary Media:

Actually, it’s not the people that are alive, but the fragments made possible by technical media. Voice is in itself an interesting special case due to its historical relation to death and the uncanny through the technical recording of meticulous accuracy (“vocal vibrations of air waves” as the above-mentioned Scientific American story explains) that was much awed at in the early reports from 1870s onwards as well as in theoretical sense. Mladen Dolar’s (2006) work on the uncannyness of the voice is masterful in how it outlines how the voice always has a possessive, excessive and haunting quality that questions the solidity of body boundaries. The voice seems to have a relation to the body, but we do not own our voices. With speech synthesis technologies, voice becomes furthermore detached from the human organic bodies, inhabiting a further uncanny quality of the dislocated voice as addressed by the sound artist Paul DeMarinis (2010: 212): “The voice, once it is taken away from the body and reconstituted as a being without corporeal substance, without status or place, without viewpoint, without the fleshy vulnerability a bared throat offers, is re-incarnated as a new clarified being. Perhaps a voice of authority, or an oracle that can speak from beyond the grave. It gives us deliriously false confidence, this chest resonance without chest, these nasals without nose, plosives without lips or tongue, this singer of songs-without-throats.”

Kill the darling part 4, Dijkstra's last words

One more - this time it's time to say goodbyes to a reference to Edsger Dijkstra's classic text mentioned in the context of Kittler's media theory. I am not sure if this passage would have worked anyway, but the idea was to elaborate Kittler's media ontology and some of its post-structuralist underpinnings with the help of programming languages. In addition to language speaking in us, it's technical media languages etc. that speak (in) us. I would still like to do something with his text, but perhaps in another context - and for those wanting to find out a bit more, check out Wendy Chun's new book on Programmed Visions where she tackles software histories, including structured programming.

In this classic of software history and structured programming, Edsger W. Dijkstra’s (1968: 147. Cf. Chun 2004) “Go To Statements” considered harmful he writes:

[…] although the programmer’s activity ends when he has constructed a correct program, the process taking place under control of his program is the true subject matter of his activity, for it is this process that has to accomplish the desired effect; it is this process that in its dynamic behavior has to satisfy the desired specifications. Yet, once the program has been made, the ‘making’ of the corresponding process is delegated to the machine.”

If read through the media theoretical lenses of Kittler and materialist media theory, such an idea is not only part of the emergence of structured programming in the 1960s, but a good crystallization of the bootstrapped autonomy of process of language – also software.

Kill the darling part 3: Tesla gets electrocuted

And now it's turn for Tesla and Nollet. This was from a passage concerning the spectacle of electricity...:

Reading Nollet’s (1749) Recherches sur les causes particulières des phénomènes électriques gives an insight to the enthusiasm concerning the Leyden jar at that time, and Nollet’s continous experiments that had to do with the different material characteristics of bodies – organic and non-organic – to convey, to communicate with each other through the medium of electricity. Later, a similar enthusiasm surrounding Tesla’s performances in his laboratory at Colorado Springs were reported both in wider public as well as specialist publications. The Tesla Coil was a spectacular demonstration of the powers of electricity – and the new worlds of different materialism emerging with that worldview, not without implications to how we approach and think about media technology:

“As early as 1890 this savant had produced electrical disturbances in his laboratory at Colorado Springs equal to the lightning produced by Nature. Although a number of years have elapsed since these experiments were conducted, not a single scientist or engineer has been able to produce such awe-inspiring, electrical performance as did Dr. Tesla. It is true that he is far ahead of his time in many of his inventions, yet he has ably demonstrated that it is possible to imitate some of Nature’s secret forces, but he was performing certain experiments on the problem of radio transmission of electrical energy through space.”

(Samuel Cohen, “ “Lightning Made to Order”, The Electrical Experimenter, New York, November 1916, 474. Quoted from Tesla 1961: 93-94).

Kill the darling, part 2: Brewster gets the boot

More garbage coming out from the Media Archaeology and Digital Culture: yet another footnote who hit the wrong note, had a date with the guillotine, and finished his days. This one on Brewster's kaleidoscope.

Sir David Brewster’s ideas concerning the ontological and practical implications of his device are intriguing and hint both towards a history of genetic algorithms and the birth of the creative industries. He outlines the kaleidoscope as an machine for infinity of forms, where to paraphrase Brewster (1858: 132) even one single line as the object of the device is able to vary into “an infinite number of figures from this single line.” Patterns emerging out from objects, lines, and mathematical simplicity reminds of the artificial life patterning that took hold of the aesthetics of the 1990s digital culture, but it also points towards how Brewster imagined this to revolutionalize design and the creative process. Indeed, in the midst of the industrial revolution in England, it was not only the manufacturing of “simple” objects such as pins that could be automated – but visual culture too: “When we consider, that in this busy island thousands of individuals are wholly occupied with the composition of symmetrical designs, and that there is scarcely any profession into which these designs do not enter as a necessary part, so as to employ a portion of the time of every artist, we shall not hesitate in admitting, that an instrument must have no small degree of utility which abridges the labour of so many individuals. If we reflect further on the nature of the designs which are thus composed, and on the methods which must be employed in their composition, the Kaleidoscope will assume the character of the highest class of machinery, which improves at the same time that it abridges the exertions of individuals. There are few machines, indeed, which rise higher above the operations of human skill. It will create, in a single hour, what a thousand artists could not invent in the course of a year; and while it works with such unexampled rapidity, it works also with a corresponding beauty and precision.” (Ibid.: 136).

Kill the darling: burial for a footnote

After realizing I am already now way over with my word count for Media Archaeology and Digital Culture I am starting a frantic "cut and kill"-operation. Kill the darling-phase. Of course, it hurts, as you think every word and footnote is important (just the vanity of an author). In order to fool myself, I am hence burying one of the footnotes here, and saying goodbye to it. It is from Chapter 2, where I talk about new film history, multimodality and affect, and the footnote referred to haptic interface design:

As an example, see Sutherland (1965) for early speculation of haptic and embodied display design in computer graphic environments, but also mentioning displays based on smell and taste. Of course, what has to be noted is that even the notion of “touch” is itself complex and does not automatically translate as haptic, but is divided into more than one system of sensation. To quote from a haptic interface design perspective: “As described by Klatzky and Lederman [Klatzky and Lederman 2003], touch is one of the main avenues of sensation, and it can be divided into cutaneous, kinesthetic, and haptic systems, based on the underlying neural inputs..The cutaneous system employs receptors embedded in the skin, while the kinesthetic system employs receptors located in muscles, tendons, and joints. The haptic sensory system employs both cutaneous and kinesthetic receptors, but it differs in the sense that it is associated with an active procedure. Touch becomes active when the sensory inputs are combined with controlled body motion. For example, cutaneous touch becomes active when we explore a surface or grasp an object, while kinesthetic touch becomes active when we manipulate an object and touch other objects with it.” (Otaduy and Lin 2005: 1)

Vilém Flusser - post-historical and techno-images

There won't be too much of Flusser in my new book. This is not a judgment against Flusser, just a question of me not having enough time to really dig deep enough into his work, and figuring out where exactly he would sit comfortably in relation to "media archaeology". He has his place, which is evidenced by his writings popping up in media archaeological teaching curricula, through his relation to some of the variantology and Zielinski-direction writings, by the intensive work by such scholars as Erick Felinto and others. And now, several translations of his work are out (see the Electronic Mediations-series) - so we can expect an intensive interest, perhaps.

And indeed, we can find great ideas in Flusser. His essay on the typewriter ("Why do typewriters go 'click'") is one of my favourites, and similarly in this text on "Text and Image" Flusser's thoughts amount to a medium-specific understanding why technical media demands a different attitude to that of a focus on narrative and story-telling. In short, Flusser is saying that it is almost an ethical demand that we do not see technical media such as TV as story-telling...

Hence, his way of pointing towards a post-historical attitude is curious in relation to media archaeology as a possibly post-historical, mediatic way of understanding for instance perception, consciousness and time.

"The new post-historical existential climate which characterises the technoimage culture articulates itself in many ways, for instance in structuralism, cybernetics, scenario-based politology, or trans-ideologisation. It may be concretely observed in the programs impressed into the memories of computers, intelligent tools, and miniprocessors. However, it is as yet very far from having become entirely conscious. We live, all of us, as yet on the magico-mythical and on the historical level. We decipher, all of us, TV programmes as if they were traditional images or as if they were linear texts telling some story. Which means that we find ourselves in the same situation that illiterate Israelites found themselves in faced by the Sinai stone tablets. Instead of deciphering these programmes critically, we adore them. It is difficult for us to live and think on the level on which techno-images are made. This is why they tend to programme us, just as texts programmed the masses during their illiterate situation. Unless we learn how to decipher techno-images, unless we may achieve what may be called "conscious techno-imagination" , we are bound to become dominated by the apparatus-operator complex. Which seems to function objectively, but which in reality manipulates us from the subjective, although inhuman, point of view of the apparatus." (Flusser, in Variantology 4. On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and technologies in the Arabic-Islamic World and Beyond, edited by Siegfried Zielinski and Echard Fürlus. Walther König, Köln 2010: 115).¨

You can find echoes of such a relation to media competency in Zielinski too (Deep Time of the Media, for instance the final chapter), and it's relation to understanding digital image cultures is intriguing. The links to media archaeology are multiple, and probably we will soon more good work that explicates these links in more detail.